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Friday, 28 February 2014

On Not Being the Vice-President

Long ago, in Grade 9 English, a district superintendent or
some such official came to look in on us and help with a story we were
studying.I can’t remember what story it
was, but there was a scene in a park with picnickers carrying their
grandfathers.And there were
samovars.Maybe it was a Russian
story.

The superintendent asked us if anything struck us as odd in
the scene.Someone ventured, “The
samovars?”“No, no,” said the
superintendent, or maybe our regular English teacher, who was also there.“That’s just a Russian teapot.”It was the people carrying their
grandfathers, which I think had struck me as odd, but too odd even to ask about.It’s hard to raise a question when you hardly
even understand something – except that’s the very thing to ask about, I
learned that day.

And maybe I also learned to enjoy analyzing stories from
that and also to think that it’s better to do something hands-on like analyzing
a story than to be some distant superintendent, a manager supervising others
who get to do the hands-on work.I felt
sorry for the District Superintendent, if not then, at least in retrospect: he
was someone who knew how to get to the root of a story, making it come alive
for students, but mostly his job must have been just overseeing others.

In some fields, of course, management is the prize people
aim for, and some people must like managing others, but to me it’s a bit like
being the coach instead of Wayne Gretzky.You could say, of course, that an athlete, even a star athlete, or a
creative writer or a comedian is doing mere grunt work.Better to be the Vice-President in charge of
whatever instead of some lowly pencil-pusher, but if pencil-pushing is somehow
creative, if the work is something like Gretzky behind the net or Graham Greene
producing a new novel, who wouldn’t rather be that than mired in management?

The Talent, not the manager, the literary critic, not the
district superintendent.But everyone is
different, I suppose, and I suppose we need those Vice-Presidents.

…

When I read the first part of this blog to my girl-friend,
she paused and said, “I’m a Vice-President.”

Uh oh, I said.

So let me say that I have nothing against vice-presidents,
and as my girl-friend went on to tell me, sometimes she likes to do the
hands-on work, but not always.Maybe the
District Superintendent was happy not to have to teach an English class every
day; maybe it was nice just to do it once in a while.I published a novel once, but haven’t since,
and when I think of someone like Agatha Christie or even, yes, Graham Greene,
maybe even creative work could seem tedious if you had to keep churning it out
year after year.So there you go …